I am so sad to tell you of the death of Lynne Medhurst. She was found dead at her house on Friday.
Without Lynne there would be no website here.
I was exhibiting at possibly my second Miniatura when a little figure, wearing a beret at a jaunty angle, came up to my table and began looking at the dolls. Just behind me a voice said ‘This is someone you have to help.’ I thought my husband had spoken but he had not.
The girl in the beret said ‘I’m the editor of Dolls House World magazine and I’m taking this doll kit to review.’
I said, ‘Ok.’
Thus began a friendship of what has turned out to be some thirty years.
Lynne reviewed the doll kit saying she had made it easily with the assistance of ‘the hand of a friend.’ The friend in question was her husband, who, I learned later, had an incurable brain tumour. He died shortly afterwards. By then I was writing for the magazine, which Lynne asked me to do on the strength of the instructions in the doll kit.
The magazine is why I abandoned my stand and ran round the hall interviewing miniaturists. The interviews gave me something to write about for six months until the next Miniatura, when I repeated the feat. One show I interviewed twenty six artists, two of them in languages I did not speak.
Because I had discovered that Lynne was editing for a pittance while caring for her dying husband, when I rang, if she was not immediately available I used to say ‘Tell her not to worry, it’s just Jane.’ She then called my column, in which I sent up the hobby, Just Jane. For years I wondered why.
It was reporting for the magazine, which had a six month lead-in, to cause miniaturist artisans to ask me if there was a better way of getting the stuff they were making for the show, and often only finished days before, publicised. They wondered if there were a faster way of telling visitors about their latest oeuvre. So began JaneLaverick.com so that just a few days before Miniatura, artists could email me and I could tell visitors, who could then rush to the artisan they were collecting and miss nothing.
This website has enabled me to talk to miniaturists, to help carers of demented people, to show you what I’m doing and to be satisfyingly silly in writing. It would not be here without Lynne.
Two years ago in the autumn the miniverse lost John Hodgson (who Lynne admired beyond measure), Lawrence St Leger, and the great Terry Curran, whose miniature pots appeared in a coffee table book of great (full scale) potters of the twentieth century. Because of Lynne and the magazine, I talked to them all, collected them all and loved them all.
Most of all I loved Lynne. She overcame terrible difficulties in life. She had a terrible upbringing with parents who were not always on the right side of the law, but was herself straight as a die and honest as the day is long. All alone, after the death of her husband, she paid off her mortgage and brought up two children, often living through the winter on porridge.
She was brave, she was true, she was a cracking writer, she was only in her sixties. She had many difficulties but never built up resentment about her life, instead she put her head in a dolls house, shrank life to manageable proportions and helped and celebrated others who wanted to do the same.
If you are going to Miniatura this coming weekend and you wish to celebrate the lives of Lynne, Lawrence, John and Terry, enjoy every moment of the show. Love every second, love every miniaturist and be glad of a show for miniaturists by miniaturists.
Life is difficult, we are here to learn, but I have been privileged to know so many people who turned difficulty into enduring art, wonderful writing, world class wood carving, pottery, metal work and every skill that can be imagined.
I rang Lynne or she rang me every weekend for years. Suddenly I have a couple of hours spare every weekend for the foreseeable future.
Love every friend, there are never enough.
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